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Estimation of land surface temperature and urban patterns relationship for

urban heat island studies

Conference Paper · June 2013

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Aikaterini Stamou Stella Manika

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki University of Thessaly
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 Estimation of land surface temperature and urban patterns
relationship for urban heat island studies

Α. Stamou 1, S. Manika 2 and P. Patias 1

1
Lab of Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry, School of Rural and Surveying Engineering, Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of Engineering, University Campus, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece
2
Lab of Urban Morphology & Design, Dept. of Planning & Regional Development, Faculty of Engineering,
University of Thessaly, Pedion Areos, 38334 Volos , Greece

Corresponding author: e-mail: st.manika@gmail.com, Tel. 0030 24210 74422

Abstract

In 2008, the global urban population exceeded the non-rural population for the first time in history,
and it is estimated that by 2050, 70% of the world population will live in urban areas. Due to this
increased urbanization, the global climate destabilization has become one of the most urgent issues.
To this direction, this paper aims at exploring the impact of urban morphology on surface urban
heat island, using Remote Sensing data for two typical Mediterranean cities in Greece: Thessaloniki
and Volos. For extraction and estimation of the Urban Heat Island (UHI), LANDSAT ETM+
Satellite Imagery is used. Additional high resolution satellite data were used to estimate land cover
classes and Vegetation Indices like NDVI and OSAVI. Continuously, Statistical tests were applied,
for estimating and evaluating the interaction between the temperatures results with the extracted
Indices and land use types.

Keywords: Urban Heat Island; Remote Sensing; thermal band; Vegetation Indices; land use

1. INTRODUCTION

The global climate destabilization has become one of the most urgent issues that the scientific
society is facing nowadays. The detected Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon in urbanized areas,
combined with the decreased vegetation and the anthropogenic heat discharge, is an example of this
climate change. It is therefore advisable for countries and policy makers, to evaluate the Urban Heat
Island (UHI) phenomenon in order to estimate and control this climate destabilization. As a result,
The UHI has gained attention of public administration in municipal governments, environmental
protection offices and public health agencies [1].
By definition, an urban heat island is a metropolitan area that is significantly warmer than its
surrounding rural areas due to human activities, and this temperature difference is usually larger at
night than during the day, and it is most apparent when winds are weak. The intra-urban heat
island on the other hand, is the observed difference of temperatures inside an urban tissue, due to
the variety of land uses inside a densely populated urban area.
To this direction, this study investigates the potential application of remote sensing and GIS for
determining the growth impact to land surface temperature (LST) and urban heat island (UHI)
phenomenon. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the impact of urban morphology on
surface urban heat island, using Remote Sensing data for two typical Mediterranean cities in
Greece: Thessaloniki and Volos. More specifically, the study aims at: a) calculating Land Surface
Temperature using the thermal band of LANDSAT ETM+ for these two urban areas and b)
identifying temperature differences between land uses and assessing the correlation between land
use and surface temperature.
1.1. Study areas and data

The urban complexes of Thessaloniki and Volos, two typical Greek cities, constitute the study
areas.

Figure 1: The study areas

For the urban area of Thessaloniki, high resolution satellite imagery of WorldView-2 was available.
In specific, one panchromatic image with pixel size 0,5m and one multispectral image with pixel
size 1,8 m was used (Figure 2).
For the urban area of Volos, the only available satellite imagery was from LANDSAT ETM+, with
pixel size 30m for the multispectral image and 15 m for the panchromatic image. Additional
geographic information though, was available, such as shape files depicting land uses of the city of
Volos.
For the extraction of Land Surface Temperature,
two LANDSAT ETM+ images were used
depicting the areas of Volos and Thessaloniki.
The Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+)
of LANDSAT acquires temperature data and
stores this information as a digital number (DN)
with a range between 0 and 255. Thus, with
proper processing, information about LST can
be extracted. The images are both acquired on
28th of July. The date of these acquired images
is ideal for extracting LST since it is in the
middle of summer, were the temperatures in
Greece are high and the intra-Urban Heat Island
Figure 2: Part of the WorldView-2 image of phenomenon is expected to be more intense.
Thessaloniki
1.2. Identification of problem in the study areas

Inside these areas, the land uses, where green space is found, are classified as follows [2]: a) private
rooms (habitable spaces, front yards, facades, roofs etc, commercial premises and industrial
premises) b) areas with special management regime (such as Campus, archaeological sites, camp
sites, etc.) and c) public places (amusement parks, walkways, sidewalks, etc.).
Green spaces in the urban complex of Thessaloniki are characterized by the limited extent due to
excessive construction activity. From observation of the few modular spaces (traffic islands,
neighborhood squares and parks), the absence of small open spaces and gardens between residences
is evident. Also missing are sidewalks and large parks district, suburban parks and groves that serve
large numbers of city residents. The largest section of green space lies in the center. It is called the
"city park" and it is unique. It includes the parks of the White Tower, the YMCA, the Champ de
Mars, the beach and the Aristotle University. These are discontinuous areas, so basically tracks, and
each alone does not exceed the size and organization of "Neighborhood Park".
The city of Volos is characterized by a compact form of construction, without very high density but
with few green public spaces in downtown. The lack of public spaces in the inner fabric of the city
is balanced to some extent by the coastal zone, ie the central platform to the area of Anavros about
17km in length. With regard, however, the urban green space in public places, according to the
Study on Revision and Extension of the General Urban Plan (2009), a lack of greenery is found.
The study specifically mentions the absence of 357 acres, not counting land Soros and Agria.
The ratio of green space per inhabitant in square meters in the city of Thessaloniki in descending
order is: 8,51 m2 for the Municipality Eleftheriou-Kordelio, 7,28 m2 for the Municipality of
Kalamaria, 3,10 m2 for the City of Stavroupoli, 2.19 m2 for the Municipality of Thessaloniki, 1,36
m2 for the municipality Ampelokipoi and only 0,74 m2 for the municipality Evosmos [3]. Regarding
the urban green in Volos ratio of green space per inhabitant is 6,43 m2. In both cases the proportion
of green is much smaller than in medium and small cities in Europe.
In conclusion, these two urban areas are both densely populated, with high portion of built
environment and lack of green spaces. So the main goal of this study is to monitor and highlight the
inevitable impact of this bad urban distribution to the climatic conditions, using GIS and Remote
Sensing applications.

2. METHODOLOGY

In order to extract information for the land uses for the two study areas, a series of procedures were
performed with the available imagery.
First of all, pan-sharpening of the multispectral image of WorldView-2 for Thessaloniki and
LANDSAT for Volos were performed, in order to obtain high resolution multispectral images for
these two areas. The next step was the classification process. Both pixel-based and object-based
techniques were applied in the pan-sharpened images, and finally information for the land cover
types in Thessaloniki and Volos were extracted. The resulted features were introduced into a GIS
and the total built-up area and urban green space were calculated.
Since the urban green is considered to play important role for determining the land surface
temperatures in an urban environment, additional procedures were performed in order to identify
green correctly. More specifically, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and the
Optimized Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (OSAVI) was calculated for both images.
The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is historically one of the first VIS. It is a
normalized ratio of the NIR (near infrared) and red bands (Rouse et al. 1974):
NDVI= (NIR – Red)/(NIR + Red) (Equation 1)
NDVI is a band-ratio technique which produces a raster model that estimates the degree of
photosynthetically active vegetation within each pixel. Values in this dataset range between -1 and
1, where -1 represents no photosynthetically active vegetation and 1 represents a high degree of
photosynthetically active vegetation (Birky, 2001). Figure 3 is an image implementation of the
NDVI model of our study area generated using Landsat data.
The dark pixels have low NDVI; whites have high NDVI and gray have intermediate NDVI values.
We observe that the vegetation is represented by white (depending on the stage at which it stands),
soil with open and slightly darker shades of gray and some building materials according to their
ability to reflect solar radiation is of dark gray to black.
After doing the necessary checks and identify
which values correspond to vegetation through the
model maker, areas of vegetation are isolated and
extracted applying proper thresholds for the values
of NDVI.
It should be noted that all the specified green
spaces are identified in the satellite image. That
means one fully automated process without field
measurements can pinpoint the exact location of
all designated green spaces and other spaces that
are green areas but not public (private lawns,
uncovered plots uncovered schools or other
facilities with limited use).
The same procedures were performed for the
Figure 3: Image implementation of the NDVI OSAVI index, and by applying the proper
generated using Landsat data. thresholds the green spaces for the two study areas
were extracted correctly.

2.1 Extraction of Land Surface Temperatures

Land-surface temperature (LST) can be defined as the thermal emission from the landscape
"surface", including the top of the canopy for vegetated surfaces as well as other surfaces (such as
bare soils). LST is an important parameter in the field of atmospheric sciences as it combines the
result of all surface-atmosphere interaction and energy fluxes between the ground and the
atmosphere and is, therefore, a good indicator of the energy balance at the Earth’s surface (Wan and
Snyder, 1996). LST controls the surface heat and water exchange with atmosphere. Estimation of
LST from satellites infrared radiometers has been proven useful.
LST retrieval in this study was carried out through three phases:
1. Conversion from Digital Number to Radiance
All TM bands are quantized as 8 bit data thus; all information is stored in digital number (DN)
with range between 0 to 255.
2. Conversion from Radiance to Brightness Temperature
By applying the inverse of the Planck function, thermal bands radiance values was converted to
brightness temperature value.

K2
TB = (Equation 2)
K *ε 
ln 1 + 1
 Lλ 

Where:
T is degrees Kelvin
CVR is the cell value as radiance
K1 is calibration constant 1 (607.76 for TM) and (666.09 for ETM+)
K2 is calibration constant 2 (1260.56 for TM) and (1282.71 for ETM+)
[4], [5], [6]

3. Conversion of Temperature values from Kelvin to Celsius with the following equation:

TC= TK – 273.13 (Equation 3)

The following figures show the derived images for the urban areas of Volos and Thessaloniki
(Figures 4, 5), with temperature values.

Figure 4: The derived raster image of Volos with temperature values

Figure 5: The derived raster image of Thessaloniki with temperature values

2.2 Correlation analysis between LST and land cover types of the study areas

In order to identify temperature differences between land cover classes and estimate the association
between land use and surface temperature, vector data analysis with zonal statistics and descriptive
statistics were applied.
The correlation analysis between LST, land cover classes was performed in SPSS 19 for evaluating
the impact of land cover types at the distribution of LST in the study areas. It has to be mentioned,
that for the area of Volos, since the only available satellite image was the one from LANDSAT
ETM+ that has low special analysis(15 m), additional shape files of the land cover types were used,
in order to have more accurate and correct results.
The results after performing Spearman’s rho correlation revealed that there is positive relationship
between surface temperature and built up areas(r= 0.459 for Thessaloniki and r= 0.632 for Volos).
These results lead to conclusion that areas with high density of built-up tend to be associated with
higher temperatures. On the other hand, there is a negative relation for green space and surface
temperature. Areas with significant urban green have lower surface temperatures. Both correlation
coefficients were significant at 0.01 level.
Figure 6 and 7 show graphically the results with the temperature for each land use type for the study
areas.

Figure 6: Mean temperatures for each land cover type, for Thessaloniki

Figure 7: Mean temperatures for each land cover type, for Volos

3. RESULTS

Analyzing the results of the Land Surface Temperatures for the study areas, it is concluded that, in
the urban area of Thessaloniki the observed temperatures are much higher than the temperatures of
Volos. In specific, the mean temperature value for Thessaloniki is calculated 33o C, while for the
same date, the observed mean temperature for Volos is 27o C. Since both areas have similar
morphological characteristics as they are both cities with coastal front areas and with low altitude,
 this observed difference in temperature can be explained by the difference in built up density.
Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece, with densely populated urban areas and with
narrow road networks and high buildings. On the other hand, Volos is a small city, with spacious
built up areas and buildings with average or small heights.

4. CONCLUSIONS

This study examined the relationship between land cover types of an urban environment of two
cities in Greece, with surface temperatures. After applying the appropriate procedures on the
available satellite imagery for these two areas, land cover types were extracted as well as Land
Surface Temperatures for a hot summer day.
The intra-urban patterns of UHI that were observed in both cities, confirmed that the temperatures
at the inner part of the city were higher compared to the coastal front. Additionally, the statistical
tests that followed revealed that the average temperatures of the built up were significantly higher
than the temperatures of the green space for both areas.
Comparing the results for two cities, it is revealed that the densely populated area of Thessaloniki,
with low percentage of green space tends to have higher temperatures for the same day. This is
another evidence that urban environment can affect the observed intra-urban Heat Island
phenomenon.
In conclusion, this study demonstrates that Remote Sensing techniques can introduce new
approaches for detecting and monitoring the climate conditions for the complex urban
environments, without the need of field measurements. This advantage can prove to be very useful
for urban planners and policy makers, regarding the development of strategies for improving the
urban environment.

References

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Reducing Urban Heat Islands: Compendium of Strategies, Chapter 1, Draft report; US EPA:
Washington, DC, USA. Available online at:
http://www.epa.gov/hiri/resources/compendium.htm (accessed 25 July 2012)
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urban greenery growth”, Phd Thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of Forestry
and Natural Environment, Thessaloniki, Greece.
3. Ganatsos P., Tsitsoni, Th., Zagas, Th. and Tsakaldimi, M., 2002. “Review of urban green
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